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CALL FOR WORKSHOP PAPERS
IEEE VisWeek 2010 Workshop on Visual Analytics in Health Care

http://research.ihost.com/vahc2010/

This workshop will explore new applications, technologies, and directions for visual analytics in health care. The workshop will be held in conjunction with IEEE VisWeek 2010 which is to be held October 24-29, 2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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Around the world, tremendous sums of money and time are being spent modernizing the health care ecosystem to improve outcomes and reduce cost. One of the critical hypotheses behind many of these efforts is that data, collected as longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs), will enable tools that provide actionable insights about a patient’s condition required to make more intelligent medical decisions. This data-driven vision promises to improve care in facilities ranging from emergency rooms to general practitioner offices.

However, these goals are hampered by many fundamental challenges: overwhelming amounts of data, siloed information repositories with non-standard semi-structured and multi-modal data streams, time-limited practitioners with great domain knowledge but often little statistical training, and large semantic gaps between the raw data that is collected and the information needs of people who are delivering care or conducting effectiveness studies. Solutions to these challenges will require multi-disciplinary visual analytics solutions that combine efforts across several intersecting research communities: data mining, visualization and visual analytics, medicine, and medical informatics.

The goal of this workshop is to gather together leading researchers from each of these often independent communities. The workshop will allow us to both review ongoing research in these fields and identify the grand challenges that must be solved at the intersection of these communities to make significant impact on the practice of health care.

We invite paper submissions that address any topic related to visual analytics and health care. Formatting and submission instructions are available on the workshop website.

Authors for selected papers will be invited to expand on their work as part of a special journal issue that has been dedicated to cover the topics in this workshop's proceedings. For more information, please visit the workshop website.

General topics within the scope of this workshop include (but are not limited to):
- Comparative effectiveness research (CER) technologies
- Healthcare administration technologies
- Medical home technologies
- Outcome forecasting or prediction
- Visual data mining of medical records
- Physiological data analysis and visualization
- Patient similarity
- Point-of-care applications
- Situational awareness for critical care
- Social network analysis for patients and providers
- Temporal medical record analysis and presentation
- Teaming technologies to coordinate nurses, doctors, and other staff
- Visual drug discovery technologies
- Pandemic forecasting and tracking

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Important Dates
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* August 27, 2010 - Submissions due
* September 28, 2010 - Final drafts due for accepted papers
* October 24, 2010 - IEEE VisWeek begins

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For More Information
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More information about the workshop, including paper formatting and submission guidelines, is available at the conference website:
http://research.ihost.com/vahc2010/